Notes.

10/04/2009

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organisation department's job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Walmart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the bosses of the television networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.
All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organisation department. With a few largely symbolic exceptions, the people who fill these jobs are also party members. Not only that, the vetting process takes place behind closed doors and appointments are announced without any explanation about why they have been made. When the department knocks back candidates for promotion, it does so in secret as well.

08/24/2009

The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. For instance, I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared.

The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that he was not in his work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, and plant wide searches all documented in detail.

After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. He received a 30-day unpaid lay-off because he was a “repeat offender.”

When he returned, he thanked me for the paid vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM to give him the time with pay.

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV.

I went to Labor Relations for assistance. The Labor Relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. None applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? There were no consequences.

Eventually, I was promoted to a management position at GM headquarters. As I left the plant, I gave my supervisor a blunt message. I told him that I expected the union to act like the union, but I was disappointed that management didn’t act like management.

07/17/2009

In the fall I came back to Harvard with a nagging question. It was something like, Why did there seem to be more honor and decency in those uneducated black farmers in rural Mississippi than there was, and I mean no offense, among my fellow graduate students at Harvard? Many of my fellow students shared my altruistic left-liberal political opinions, but what struck me was that, in their own lives, they were all out for number one. They all wanted to see their names in lights, and were happy to elbow each other aside in pursuit of professional rewards. They were prototypical limousine liberals. Their compassionate concern for others cost them nothing, while they lived high and fast. The only explanations I could offer were that the black farmers were religious and churchgoing or that their virtues were the product of a simple life of poor but honest farming. Now, if either were true, then it called into question my intuitive belief that education and scientific and technological progress would put an end to superstition, suffering, and poverty, enabling human beings to realize their underlying morally good nature, and that finally all good things would walk hand in hand into the sunset.

06/25/2009

Jonathan Mahler's story in the NYT magazine describes workers at a UAW plant -- a strange world in which less is demanded of a person than at an average job, in return for which the pay and benefits are much higher. The reader is invited to have sympathy for these privileged few. Excerpts:

By the mid-1990s, though, with the Big Three losing market share and staggering under the weight of their union contracts, it became difficult to find assembly-line work in a plant, particularly if you didn’t have a personal connection to the company. Hiring was governed almost exclusively by nepotism. If an automaker was looking to add workers, it invited existing employees to pass along a referral sheet — essentially a one-page job application — to a friend or relative. Nearly all of the autoworkers under the age of 40 whom I met in Detroit found their jobs through a family member. [What could be more sympathetic than workers who get high-paying jobs by virtue of family connections, after a one -page application...]

[...]

A practicing Christian, Powell was taken aback by what he saw taking place around him. The plant was a world of temptations unto itself, with drugs, alcohol, numbers runners, bookies and even “parking-lot girls” who would come to the plant during lunch breaks to service male workers. “Anything you can find outside the plant, you can find inside the plant,” Powell says. “You either get caught up in it, or stay apart from it.” [I know that every workplace I ever encountered has had "parking lot girls" -- it makes for the epitome of a professional, respectable environment.]

[...]

Powell gradually settled in at Pontiac Assembly and was soon piling on as much overtime as he could. In a good week, he worked four 12-hour days and a 16-hour day. Overtime was especially abundant between the beginning of November and Christmas, when hunting season caused rampant absenteeism at the plant. [If I cared a lot about my job and were concerned about my career, I would definitely be sure to go AWOL every year at hunting season...]

[...]

One 38-year-old former Chrysler employee I met, who accepted a buyout package last fall — $50,000 and a $25,000 car voucher — had burned through all of the cash by May and still hadn’t been on a single job interview. I wondered how much longer he would be able to afford to put gas in the brand-new Aspen S.U.V. he bought with his voucher. [This sounds like an extremely responsible person with excellent judgment who certainly deserves a bailout and public sympathy because he's a "worker"]

[...]

After graduating from a magnet high school in the city, Shirese said, she took out loans to attend Northwood University and soon transferred to Eastern Michigan University. During her sophomore year, she dropped out after souring on the party scene. [...]

After high school, Powell enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and was planning to major in mass communications and broadcasting, but he dropped out halfway toward his degree. He wasn’t the most focused student. [...]

(Powell’s brother, Aaron, attended Winston-Salem State University on a basketball scholarship, but never graduated and now works at a Pepsi bottling plant in Detroit.) [These really aren't the greatest life decisions to be making...]

03/25/2009

It is hard to overstate how reliant the Southern California economy has always been on population growth to drive its economic growth -- in oversimplified terms, building houses for the next wave of home builders. In the beginning, the early developers could be pretty confident that if they built it, they would come -- from the Northeast and Midwest, and then from all corners of the globe. But in recent years, this perpetual growth machine has pretty much run out of steam as residents old and new confronted the realities of two-hour commutes, bad air, a shortage of water and a backlash against illegal immigration.

Moreover, without the steady growth in tax revenue that came with population growth, the Ponzi scheme that passes for public finance in California was suddenly and painfully revealed. Much of the blame lies with public employee unions and a handful of other special-interest groups that have essentially hijacked political control of state and local governments. Now, despite decades of high taxes and rapid growth, state and local governments find that they not only don't have the revenue to provide even basic services, but are saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities and infrastructure needs.

02/01/2009

In an unbelievably shocking surprise, Evo Morales's indigenist Third-Worldist socialist revolution leads to impingements on due process of law and legally established civil liberties! Who could have imagined such a thing? Next we will hear that Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian revolution has hurt economic growth and fed corruption in Venezuela. What a far-fetched and improbable scenario!

The November incident, seen around the world on YouTube, provoked outrage here and abroad. It was not an isolated instance. At least 54 people were killed in mostly indigenous Bolivian towns and suburbs last year by mobs taking the law into their own hands.

Among other lynchings last year, three policemen accused of extortion were killed by a mob in the town of Epizana in February. The incident prompted a United Nations warning that Bolivia's "weak judicial apparatus and the slow reaction of authorities favors an impunity that only encourages a repetition of these acts."

...

The question in the minds of many legal experts is whether incidents such as the lynchings here will decrease as the Indians sense that they have more legal recourse, or increase as they legally dispense the summary justice that characterizes their approach. [Three guesses... -ed.]

Showing the same acument that has made the Detroit automakers and public schools such undisputed masters in their fields, state employees show their willingness to completely capsize the ship of state for the sake of maintaining their ever-increasing pay and numbers, without any regard to justification, performance, or priorities.

And needless to say, Democratic politicians prove themselves willing to govern exclusively for the benefit of their main constituency -- unionized state workers -- as opposed to that of the state as a whole.

Cutting the state workforce "is just very difficult to do," said Jason Dickerson, a public employment expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. "It can be a very long and cumbersome process."

Personnel records show that there have been no mass layoffs in state government since 1975, when 2,500 California Department of Transportation employees lost their jobs during a budget crunch...

Schwarzenegger has been stymied in previous efforts to reduce the workforce.

His 2004 California Performance Review, a top-to-bottom examination of state government, proposed various ways the state could consolidate operations to function more effectively. The Legislature rejected every one of them. The governor put the proposals on the back burner, and the state payroll continued to grow...

But Frates said there is a reluctance to irritate the powerful unions with talk of job reductions before it is absolutely necessary. By then, it is usually too late to devise a practical plan. "The political will just isn't there," he said.

Unlike normal organizations, which grow in good times and shrink in bad times, and in which good performance is rewarded and bad performance is punished, public employee unions and their Democratic public servants instead grow like a Behemoth or Leviathan, subordinating all public interest to their quest for more pay for mediocre performance.

The Roberts court is, then, conservative by the standards of recent history. But is it conservative in some absolute sense?

“It is fair to say that the Supreme Court both now and historically has been to the left of the American public,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Columbia and an editor of “Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy” (Oxford, 2008).

“On school prayer, for instance, the Supreme Court is far to the left of the American public,” Professor Persily said, referring to decisions saying that officials may not organize, lead or endorse prayer or devotional Bible reading in the public schools.

“On racial issues, it’s pretty clear from the Michigan cases that the Supreme Court is out of step with the American public,” Professor Persily said of the pair of 2003 decisions allowing public universities to consider race in admissions decisions. (In a 2007 decision, the Roberts court leaned the other way, forbidding public school systems from explicitly taking race into account to achieve or maintain integration.)

01/27/2009

How strange - the useful idiots among the chattering classes had given me the impression that Hamas was a movement with unimpeachable democratic credentials and that by failing to recognize their legitimate constitutional standing, the imperialist USA was undermining democracy in the region.

One of his neighbors weighs in: "Many people are now against Hamas but that won't change anything," he says. "Because anyone who stands up to them is killed." Since they took power Hamas has used brutal force against any dissenters in the Gaza Strip. There were news agency reports that during the war they allegedly executed suspected collaborators with Israel. The reign of terror will go on for some time, says the neighbor who doesn't want to give his name. "There will never be a rebellion against Hamas. It would be suicide."

Given the utter moral idiocy of the international community, it bears repeating even ad infinitum: only one side in this conflict gives a flying fig about humanitarian concerns and the rules of war, and it's not the Islamist death cult.

Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.

"After the first week, at night time, there was a call for a house in Jabaliya. I got to the house and there was lots of shooting and explosions all around," he said.

Because of the urgency of the call, Mr Shriteh said there was no time to arrange his movements with the IDF.

"I knew the Israelis were watching me because I could see the red laser beam in the ambulance and on me, on my body," he said.

Getting out of the ambulance and entering the house, he saw there were three Hamas fighters taking cover inside. One half of the building had already been destroyed.

"They were very scared, and very nervous … They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to put them in the ambulance and take them away. I refused, because if the IDF sees me doing this I am finished, I cannot pick up any more wounded people.

"And then one of the fighters picked up a gun and held it to my head, to force me. I still refused, and then they allowed me to leave."

Mr Shriteh says Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds Hospital's fleet of ambulances during the war.

"You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you. So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone."

01/13/2009

Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain famously opined that "death, perhaps, is a bit too easy" for Rushdie. He was later knighted for services to community relations...

Ramin Gray, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre, recently admitted that he would be reluctant to stage a play that was critical of Islam. "You would think twice," he said. "You'd have to take the play on its merits but given the time we're in, it's very hard because you'd worry that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully."...

Almost any criticism of Islam or any of its adherents is likely to trigger accusations of Islamophobia. For example, in 2007 the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque exposed various preachers making hateful and violent statements regarding women, Jews, homosexuals and infidels. By any journalistic measure it was a compelling and revelatory documentary. But in the media storm that followed it was not the inflammatory preachers but the programme-makers who found themselves subject to an inquisition....

Even a critic of The Satanic Verses, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who felt the book was insulting to Islam, signed a petition stating that "no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer". Five years later Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by Islamic extremists...

Inayat Bunglawala, spokesperson for the Jamaat-i-Islami-influenced Muslim Council of Britain, probably the most-often cited Islamic organisation in the country, passed both tests with flying colours. He was, in his own words, "elated" when Khomeini delivered the fatwa. "It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a truly global and powerful movement."...

Respecting culture has come to mean restricting debate. Malik quotes the sociologist Tariq Modood on this issue: "If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each other's fundamental beliefs to criticism."...

Three years ago we came within a single parliamentary vote of being saddled with a law (the Religious Hatred Act) that meant you or I could beimprisoned for seven years for using insulting language, even if the insult was unintentional and referred to an established truth...

Jimmy Carter US president, 1977-81: "Rushdie's book is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated ... The death sentence proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response. It is our duty to condemn the threat of murder [but] we should be sensitive to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate Muslims."

Germaine Greer writer and academic: "I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles."

12/16/2008

The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.

The stultifying results are endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.

As these conflicts and crises grow ever more intense, and as the ruling elite continues with impunity to crush and to strip away the rights of citizens to freedom, to property, and to the pursuit of happiness, we see the powerless in our society—the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas—becoming more militant and raising the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions. The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional.

10/10/2007

Since the Soviet Union was too soft for his tastes, there were only two
countries that Che found truly admirable: Maoist China and Kim Il Sung's
North Korea. He bragged that there was "not a single discrepancy" between
Mao's world view and his own. As Che was happily fawning over Mao in the
flesh in Beijing, in the surrounding countryside there was an epidemic of
mothers cutting off the flesh from their inner thighs to feed it to their
starving children. The programme that caused this biting hunger - the mass
collectivisation of the farms - represented "true socialist morality", Che
said. The dictator killed 70 million people in the end, cheered on by his
guerrilla friend at every stage.

Of course, Che's defenders act as if this was the only choice confronted by
Latin Americans: you were either for US-imposed market fundamentalism, or
for Maoist Communism. But you don't have to look very far in Che's life to
see that this is a lie. His diaries show that he was constantly appalled to
discover that almost everyone around him, including the revolutionaries
fighting by his side, did not share his Maoist vision for the future. His
first wife, Hilda Gadea, was a social democrat. She wanted to depose the
US-backed tyrants - and then replace them with moderate, Swedish-style mixed
economies. Che ridiculed and pilloried her as "bourgeois", before abandoning
both her and their child.

09/08/2007

While Venezuela earns record proceeds from oil exports, consumers face shortages of meat, flour and cooking oil. Annual inflation has risen to 16 percent, the highest in Latin America, as Chávez tripled government spending in four years.

...

The bolivar has tumbled 30 percent this year to 4,850 per dollar on the black market, the only place it trades freely because of government controls on foreign exchange. That compares with the official rate of 2,150 per dollar set in 2005. Chávez may have to devalue the bolivar to reduce the gap and increase oil proceeds, which make up half the government's revenue.

...

As the gap between the official exchange rate and the black market rate has increased, so has the incentive to exploit rules, like a regulation that allows people to spend $5,000 a year on their credit cards while traveling abroad.

Some Venezuelans travel to nearby Curaçao, where they buy $5,000 of casino poker chips with their credit cards, exchange the chips for cash and then sell the dollars on the black market back in Caracas.

...

Chávez, who is seeking to end presidential term limits, has taken $17 billion of foreign reserves from the central bank and expropriated dozens of farms that he deemed underutilized.

He nationalized Venezuela's biggest private electric and telephone utilities and took majority stakes in oil projects owned by Exxon and ConocoPhillips. Foreign direct investment was a negative $881 million in the first half as foreign companies pulled out money.

Chávez terminated the broadcast license of the country's most-watched television network in May, sparking weeks of student protests. He has threatened to take over cement makers, hospitals, banks, supermarkets and butcher shops, saying they were not obeying price controls.

I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

Windschuttle:

n 2001, the average GDP per head in the Philippines was $4000. At the same time, twenty-five years of revolution in Vietnam had produced a figure of only half as much, a mere $2100. Even those Vietnamese who played major roles in the transformation are now dismayed at the outcome. The former Vietcong General Pham Xuan An said in 1999: “All that talk about ‘liberation’ twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.”

These “half-educated theorists” were the very mandarins Chomsky and his supporters so badly wanted to succeed and worked so hard to install.

The Russian State, as it emerged after the defeat of the Mongols, had an intensely Christian and national character, but was firmly set in the political ways it had learnt from the khans. Thereafter, the Great Russians lived in an almost permanent state of mobilization, as the frontier against the continual menace from the steppe. As Pavel Miliukov wrote, "Compelling national need resulted in the creation of an omnipotent State on the most meagre material foundation; this very meagreness constrained it to exert all the energies of its population -- and in order to have full control over these energies it had to be omnipotent". There is nothing, or nothing much, "ethnic" in such descriptions of the Russian past. The merchant cities of Novgorod and Pskov, which had emerged beyond the Mongol reach, were regarded by the Hanseatic cities as particularly creditworthy. This trait disappeared on their annexation to Muscovy. The Hanse now forbade all credit to Russians. It was observed that cheating became endemic. This was a commonplace in report after report over the centuries. A British ambassador to St Petersburg in Catherine the Great?s time remarked more broadly: "The form of government certainly is and will always be the principal cause of want of virtue and genius in the country, as making the motive of one and the reward of the other both depend upon accident and caprice".

Most people who met Brecht during his difficult years in the United States were less than impressed. Poet W. H. Auden, who collaborated with Brecht on adapting Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" for Broadway, thought Brecht was "an odious person," while theatre critic Eric Bentley described him as a scoundrel "without elementary decency."

Because of his abrasive and authoritarian personality, Brecht made no friends across the Atlantic. If anything helped him survive those difficult years, it was his unshakable and unflinching belief in his own greatness.

Brecht's relationship with the German emigration was no less tempestuous. Theodor Adorno -- sociologist, philosopher and prominent member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist social theory -- wrote that "Brecht spends two hours a day pushing dirt under his fingernails to make himself look proletarian."

03/29/2006

Creative destruction is the true secret of capitalism that the KGB never discovered...Perfectly good Uzbek cotton which had real value as raw material – it could be sold for hard currency on the world market – was made into shirts so poorly cut and of such ugly colours that not even Soviet consumers would buy them. Hence all the spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting and sewing actually removed value from the raw material, turning virgin cotton into rags fit only for paper-making[...]

[I]n the country of “management science”, the CIA was and is no good at recruiting, motivating, directing and sustaining, that is, managing people, so as to generate good information, and have them do useful things. Self-indulgence, explains much: instead of benefiting from a reassuring continuity, agents are abruptly assigned new controllers because the “career management” of the latter comes first; defectors (“ralliers”) are abandoned to their own devices in sparsely furnished suburban apartments until they re-defect or just give up, because CIA officers must first of all attend to their own busy social life, family life, play golf and go fishing with their buddies; when assigned specific tasks – even for years on end – CIA officers do not learn the requisite languages because they must attend to their own busy social life, family life etc, and their superiors very culpably do not impose the choice on them of learning the languages or finding themselves another job in the parking or office-cleaning industries[...]

12/13/2005

It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist, but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that some Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.

Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 134, quoted in François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (U. of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 191-192.

Miami University’s Robert W. Thurston, in his 1996 book Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia,
rejects the overwhelming evidence that Stalin’s purges took the lives
of millions. He concedes only 681,692 executions in the years 1937 and
1938, and a mere 2.5 million arrests. Even using those low-ball
figures, that means that nearly one of every 20 adult Soviet males went
to prison and that more than 900 of them were executed per day.
Nonetheless, Thurston says Stalin has gotten a bad rap: There was no
"mass terror...extensive fear did not exist...[and] Stalin was not
guilty of mass first-degree murder."

Theodore Von Laue, a professor emeritus of history at Clark University, goes further in a 1999 essay in The Historian. He says it’s the damnable Russian peasantry that ought to be begging poor Stalin
for forgiveness: "He supervised the near-chaotic transformation of
peasant Eurasia into an urban, industrialized superpower under
unprecedented adversities. Though his achievements were at the cost of
exorbitant sacrifice of human beings and natural resources, they were
on a scale commensurate with the cruelty of two world wars. With the
heroic help of his uncomprehending people, Stalin provided his country,
still highly vulnerable, with a territorial security absent in all
history." And Stalin was no mere poet, Von Laue adds, but a damn fine
technocrat too: "The sophisticated design of Soviet totalitarianism has
perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated."

Columbia’s Eric Foner, a past president of both the American
Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians,
staking his bid as founder of what might be called the Smiley-Face
School of History, denounces "the obsessive need to fill in the blank
pages in the history of the Soviet era." He wasn’t talking about pesky
American historians using the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out
new horror stories about J. Edgar Hoover but about a Moscow exhibition
on the Soviet gulag. What possible good could come of learning the
details of that?

Foner, Von Laue, and Thurston are not lone nuts, the academic
equivalents of Mark Lane and Ramsey Clark, but important revisionist
historians. The revisionists, mostly baby boomer survivors of the New
Left, have been conducting their own Cold War with traditionalist
historians for nearly four decades. Unlike in the rest of the world, in
academia their side was victorious. Since the 1970s, it’s been an
article of faith in historical journals and university presses that the
United States rather than the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to
world peace and political freedom.

...

And finally, in 1995, the U.S. government released thousands of KGB
cables intercepted and decoded in the 1940s in a top-secret operation
known as Venona. In all, some 2 million pages of new documents became
available, a historical payload of unfathomable proportions and
inestimable impact.

The new picture of American Communists that emerged looked nothing
like the one painted by the revisionists. The CPUSA was founded in
Moscow, funded from Moscow (as late as 1988 Gus Hall was signing
receipts for $3 million a year), and directed by Moscow; the Comintern
reviewed everything from the party’s printing bills to its public
explanations of the nuances of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the
slightest misstep could bring scorching rebukes.

Worse yet, it really was a nest of spies: Hundreds of CPUSA members
had infiltrated the American government and were passing information to
the KGB. They honeycombed the State Department and the Office of
Strategic Services. Virtually all of the revisionists’ martyrs really
were spilling secrets to the Kremlin, including Alger Hiss, the
Rosenbergs, and a pair of Roosevelt aides, Harry Dexter White and
Laurence Duggan, who died (White of a heart attack, Duggan of a jump or
fall from a window) after being questioned by HUAC. The CPUSA would do
literally anything for Moscow, even kill: Party members were intimately
involved in assassination plots against the heretic Bolshevik Leon
Trotsky, and later they would assist in unsuccessful KGB plots to break
his murderer out of jail. More than 350 spies, nearly all CPUSA
members, are identified in the Venona cable traffic alone. One KGB
cable gave Earl Browder, the party chief from 1930 to 1945, credit for
personal recruitment of 18 spies. Another wondered how the KGB would
ever operate in the United States without the help of the CPUSA.

...

For conceding their mistake, Klehr and Haynes have undergone the
intellectual equivalent of a Stalinist show trial by their fellow
historians. A constant stream of articles in academic journals and
lefty magazines -- even an entire conference sponsored by New York
University’s International Center for Advanced Studies -- has pilloried
them for everything from "triumphalism" (that is, they’re glad Stalin
didn’t win the Cold War; can you imagine a historian of World War II
being drummed out of the profession for expressing gratitude that
Hitler didn’t win?) to accepting funding from conservative foundations
(which, unlike the tens of millions of dollars the CPUSA took from the
Kremlin, might come with secret strings attached) to starting the
Vietnam War, destroying affirmative action, and dismantling the welfare
state.

That bit about Vietnam came from a piece co-authored by Ellen
Schrecker of Yeshiva University, who in a movement rich with
unintentional self-parody nonetheless towers above the rest. We might
even call her the Lucille Ball of anti-anti-communism, though, to be
sure, she would never be so gauche as to associate with a
pre-revolutionary Cuban like Ricky Ricardo. A prodigious apologist,
Schrecker in one article conceded that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets, then plaintively demanded:
"Were these activities so awful?" She also coined the immortal phrase
"non-traditional patriots" for the Rosenbergs, a felicitous way of
saying that they lived in the United States but were loyal unto death
to the Soviet Union.

Her accusation that Haynes and Klehr were a fascist Leviathan with
their tentacles writhing in every right-wing plot of the past four
decades appeared in The Nation, which, because it has 70 years
of Stalinist apologias to justify, unsurprisingly offers some of the
most die-hard resistance to the new Cold War scholarship. It also has
contributed some hilarity to the debate, including then-editor Victor
Navasky’s argument that the word espionage was "out of context"
when applied to American Communists during the Cold War. It would be
more appropriate, he wrote, to say that "there were a lot of exchanges
of information among people of good will."

...

American University historian Anna Kasten Nelson’s argument that Venona
isn’t important because there are all kinds of good reasons a perfectly
innocent person might be secretly passing microfilm to a KGB agent.
(No, she doesn’t list any of them.) "It is time to move on," she wrote
recently, instead of "rehashing old debates" (because, you know,
historians get bored with old stuff).

When tolerance becomes a pretext for condoning “governments largely or totally opposed to their own citizens’ liberty”, we devalue the pragmatically tested convictions that are shields against extremism and we narrow the avenues of escape for those trapped in such hellholes.

Here Conquest speaks with the authority of a scholar who spent decades uncovering the hideous truth about the Soviet Union, setting out compelling, detailed evidence in such masterworks as The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrows — while being furiously denounced for his pains by Western intellectuals who didn’t want to know. Some were true believers, such as Eric Hobsbawm, others merely “useful idiots” who were, he writes, “deficient in judgment and in curiosity — gaps in the teeth and blinkers on the eyes”.

They were quite often vindictive. He quotes Orwell: “If from time to time you express a mild distaste for slave labour camps or one-candidate elections, you are either insane or actuated by the worst motives.”

The apologists include such establishment figures as C. P. Snow and even John Kenneth Galbraith who, as late as 1985, was writing of the Soviet Union’s “great economic progress” and, viewed no doubt from behind the darkened windows of a Zil limousine, the “solid well- being of the people in the streets”.

Even now, when the opening of the Soviet archives has revealed that matters were even worse than Conquest could prove, one strand of “liberalism” continues inexcusably to treat the Cold War as a battle not between free societies and totalitarian dictatorship, but between “ideologies” that, it is implied or even stated, should be seen as morally equivalent.

11/10/2005

As party members took up key positions in the studio hierarchy, they
began to wield power. As associate producers, story editors, and even
agents, they not only saw to it that fellow communists got work but—in
a sort of reverse blacklist—made sure that anti-communists didn’t.
“There’s no question they looked out for their own,” observes Hollywood
writer Burt Prelutsky, a former liberal who has migrated rightward.
“Morrie Ryskind had . . . written some great pictures, including A Night at the Opera,”
Prelutsky continues, “but he’d broken with the party and become a
Republican. For a time he couldn’t get arrested in this town.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent his last years as a studio hack, well
understood the political climate of that time. “The important thing is
you should not argue with them,” he wrote of Hollywood leftists.
“Whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put
you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’
‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in
the process.”

Well-positioned party members also worked to bar the making of anti-communist films. In a 1946 Worker
article, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo noted with satisfaction that
prominent anti-communist books of the thirties and forties such as
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon never made it to the big screen. Nor did any script touching on the Ukraine famine or the Moscow show trials. [Much like the lack of scripts today touching on Islamic terrorism? Just asking. -ed.]

...

Nonetheless, by the late thirties only the willfully blind could deny
that the party was a wholly owned Soviet subsidiary, working on behalf
of Moscow’s policy goals. Nor, by then, could any fair-minded observer
fail to grasp the nature of the Soviet regime. Reliable reporting had
described Stalin’s brutal purges in Russia, and in 1939 fascism’s
supposedly most stalwart foe signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler.
Among the committed, no hint of embarrassment showed. “I don’t believe
in that fine, little republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy
about,” sneered playwright Lillian Hellman as Stalin’s forces,
temporarily freed from their preoccupation with Germany, crushed their
northern neighbor.

...

Yes, the committee was a nest of vile bullies; and, yes, some who
opposed them had shown great courage. But what was getting
overlooked—increasingly so as time passed—was the poisonous nature of
the ideology that those on the other side were defending. Whatever the
career considerations, Kazan’s loathing of communism weighed heavily in
his decision to testify. “The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ that I did I
did out of my own true self,” he maintained.

...

The new Hollywood that emerged in the sixties was far more monolithic
in its politics than the one Kazan first encountered in the forties,
and from the outset the kinship between Hollywood’s New and Old Left
was inescapable. Even the old Communist Party epithets—“fascist,”
“reactionary,” “warmonger”—came back in vogue. That Kazan had remained
a political liberal in the years after his testimony, with a string of
trailblazing social dramas to his credit, didn’t matter; nor did the
fact that he had regularly used blacklisted actors. He was a bad guy.

...

For his part, Kazan refused to subject others to political litmus
tests. Though he opposed the Vietnam War, when his friend and fellow
ex-leftist John Steinbeck (who’d written the screenplay for Kazan’s Viva Zapata)
staunchly supported the war, even traveling to Vietnam to write
enthusiastic dispatches from the front, Kazan applauded his physical
and moral courage. He continued to profess indifference toward the
scorn heaped upon him and the uncritical praise accorded those who’d
embraced and never publicly rejected Stalinist totalitarianism. But in
private, the situation rankled.

...

“If the Academy’s occasion calls for apologies,” said Arthur
Schlesinger, “let Mr. Kazan’s denouncers apologize for the aid and
comfort they gave to Stalinism.” The Washington Post’s
Richard Cohen asked why the industry had waited so long to bestow this
honor on such a legend. “The answer is clear: He was blacklisted.”
“This whole outcry about betraying friends—of course, no one ever does
that in Hollywood,” says Prelutsky of the brouhaha. “The fact is, if
everything had been exactly the same, except the names named were those
of fascists instead of communists, they’d have been erecting statues to
the ‘informers’ on Hollywood and Vine.”

Murphy provides details that prove "beyond any reasonable doubt," as
he puts it, that the Soviet services filed alarming reports about
German intentions early and often. From Berlin, a source code-named
Ariets reported on September 29, 1940, that Hitler intended to "resolve
problems in the east in the spring of next year." Maj. Gen. Vasily
Tupikov, the Soviet military attaché in Berlin, backed up his source
and later confirmed the redeployment of large numbers of German troops
from the western to the eastern front. From Bucharest, the Soviet
military mission reported on March 26, 1941: "The Romanian general
staff has precise information that in two or three months Germany will
attack the Ukraine. The Germans will attack the Baltic states at the
same time . . . "

Stalin reacted by ridding himself of Ivan Proskurov, the head of
military intelligence who had consistently refused to buckle to his
pressure to deliver better news. His replacement, Filipp Golikov, began
relying on reports from his officers who picked up German
disinformation, which dismissed all talk of an invasion of Russia as
"English propaganda." When Golikov felt obliged to pass along a report
from his Prague station that the Germans would attack in the second
half of June, it landed back on his desk with Stalin's note in red ink:
"English provocation! Investigate!"

In keeping with that sentiment, Stalin was determined to honor his
trade commitments with Germany, and his country provided huge amounts
of oil, wood, copper, manganese ore, rubber, grain, and other resources
to keep the German military machine well stocked. He seemed genuinely
to believe that he could convince Hitler of his good intentions by such
craven behavior. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev: "So while those
sparrows were chirping, 'Look out for Hitler! Look out for Hitler!'
Stalin was punctually sending the Germans trainload after trainload of
grain and petroleum."

As Murphy spells out, Stalin also ignored reports directly from the
border regions of large German troop concentrations, and ordered his
soldiers not to open fire on German aircraft that were routinely
violating Soviet airspace to stage brazen reconnaissance missions. On
April 5, 1941, border troops received the order that, in the case of
any confrontation, they should "strictly see to it that bullets do not
fall on German territory." Instead of recognizing all the signs of
German preparations for what they were, Stalin--convinced that he
couldn't trust anyone, especially his spies who must have been doing
someone else's bidding--closed himself off more and more, and refused
to allow his generals to put their troops on a war footing. He was also
happy to keep arresting anyone who questioned his policies, dispatching
them to his legions of executioners and torturers.

Murphy's book should put to rest the myth that Stalin was a great
tactician, the brilliant savior of his country. Before he saved it, he
almost destroyed it, when he had every opportunity to prepare his
troops for the worst and at least limit their losses. In the end, 27
million Soviet citizens perished during "The Great Patriotic War." Of
those, there's no telling how many could have been saved if the country
had been led by someone who was willing to listen to the "sparrows,"
and to renounce the use of terror against his own people--at least for
the duration of their epic struggle.

Mao’s hatred of learning
was coupled with a passion to destroy China’s cultural heritage. In 1949, when
he came to power, the Mongol-Ming-Qing capital of
Beijing (Peking) was still intact, with its massive dressed stone walls and
gates, its hundreds of temples, its traditional courtyard houses with their
exquisite tile roofs, its memorial arches or pailou,
and its distinct drama, cuisine, customs, and traditions. Everything had
survived the war with Japan; were it extant today, it would constitute one of
the world’s most magnificent historical sites.

But Mao decreed its
obliteration. In 1958, on the eve of his campaign, roughly 8,000 historical
monuments were listed as still standing in the capital. Mao planned to keep only
78 of them; most were destroyed.

Rather than opposing the Japanese invasion,
Mao had welcomed it. He hoped the Japanese would engage and destroy his
rival, Chiang Kai-shek, and would also draw Soviet troops into China. Mao
avoided armed conflict not only with the Japanese but also with the
Nationalists. Rather than being a champion of independence for his country,
Mao since the 1920s had been an agent of the Soviet Union, taking its arms
and money, doing its bidding, and accepting its control of the Chinese
Communist Party. He knew his only hope of gaining power in China was with
Soviet support, a belief ultimately confirmed in his takeover of the country
in 1949. Mao was no agrarian reformer. He redistributed no land and
liberated no peasants. His initial “red base” at Ruijin in Jiangxi province,
southern China, had been achieved not by a revolutionary uprising of the
masses but through military conquest by the Red Army, armed and funded by Moscow. His rule was identical to that of an occupying army, surviving by plundering the local population and killing anyone who resisted.

Much of Snow’s account of the Long March was also untrue. The march’s
objective was to establish a new base in the north, near the Mongolian
border, in order to have ready access to Soviet supplies and arms. Many of
Snow’s tales of outnumbered Communist forces bravely breaking through Nationalist lines were pure invention. Chiang Kai-shek, in fact, largely
determined Mao’s route by giving him free passage through selected regions,
while blocking alternative routes. Chiang’s aim was to use the arrival of
the Red Army in the territories of otherwise recalcitrant provincial
warlords to coerce them into joining him, thereby exploiting the Communist presence to unify the country under Nationalist rule. Some of the most
famous battles of the Long March never took place. The celebrated crossing
of the suspension bridge over the Dadu River at Luding, for instance, had
not been in the face of Nationalist machine gun fire. No Communists were
killed there at all. And Mao shared few of the privations of his troops.
Instead of trudging over mountains and through swamps, he and the other leaders were borne throughout most of the march in litters, shaded by tarpaulins, carried by long bamboo poles on the shoulders of their bearers.

...

The biggest single number of Chinese dead was the 38
million who perished in the famine of the four years from 1958 to 1961,
during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Westerners have known since Jasper
Becker’s path-breaking 1996 book Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine that
the famine killed between 30 and 40 million people. Becker attributed this
to Mao’s ideological folly of conducting an ambitious but failed experiment
in collectivization. Chang and Halliday produce new evidence to show it was
more sinister than that.

Mao’s regime confiscated Chinese harvests in these years so it could export
food to Communist-controlled Eastern Europe in exchange for armaments and political support. Food and money were also exported to support
anti-colonial and Communist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In
the first year of famine, 1958–1959, China exported seven million tons of
grain, enough to feed 38 million people. In 1960, a year in which 22 million
Chinese died of starvation, China was the biggest international aid donor in
terms of proportion of GNP in the world. Thanks to Chinese agricultural
exports, East Germany was able to lift food rationing in 1958, and Albania
in 1961.

...

The future Canadian
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited in 1960 and wrote a starry-eyed, aptly
titled book, Two Innocents in Red China, which said nothing about the
famine. Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery visited in both 1960 and 1961 and
asserted there was “no large-scale famine, only shortages in certain areas.” He did not regard the shortages as Mao’s fault and urged him to hang on to
power: “China needs the chairman. You mustn’t abandon this ship.” The United
Nations was completely ineffectual. Its Food and Agricultural Organization
made an inspection in 1959, declaring that food production had increased by
50 to 100 percent in the past five years: “China seems capable of feeding
[its population] well.” When the French socialist leader, François
Mitterand, visited in 1961, Mao told him: “I repeat it, in order to be
heard: There is no famine in China.” Mitterand dutifully reported this
assurance to a credulous world. At the same time, Mao enlisted three writers
he knew he could trust—Edgar Snow, Han Suyin, and Felix Greene—to spread his
message through articles, books, and a celebrated BBC television interview
between a fawning Greene and Chou En-lai.

Among Western intellectuals, Mao’s most enthusiastic supporters came from
the French Left. Simone de Beauvoir visited China in 1955 and declared: “The
power he [Mao] exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt
’s was. New China’s Constitution renders impossible the concentration of
authority in one man’s hands.” She wrote a lengthy book about her visit
entitled The Long March. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, her
consort Jean-Paul Sartre praised the “revolutionary violence” of Mao as “profoundly moral.” It is true, as Chang and Halliday argue, that in terms
of electoral politics, the Maoist parties China funded in Western countries
from the 1950s to the 1970s only ever gained miniscule support. But among
intellectuals, the story was very different.

In France, the intellectual center of Maoism from the late 1960s to 1976
was the journal Tel Quel. This publication was the focus of much of the
theoretical activity that emerged in Paris at the time and was responsible
for launching the careers of many of the luminaries of the French
intellectual Left, notably the cultural analyst Roland Barthes, the
post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the theorist of psychoanalysis Jacques
Lacan, and the radical feminist Julia Kristeva. Themes that emerged in Tel
Quel at the time were taken up by the influential British Marxist journal
New Left Review and from there spread to the rest of the English-speaking
world. Tel Quel began as a Marxist-Leninist journal but became influential
in shifting the Western Left away from old Marxism, with its emphasis on the blue-collar working class as the bearer of social revolution, and towards
the new Leftism of the post-1960s period, with its emphasis on feminism, anti-racism, gay liberation, and anti-colonialism.

The journal’s founder, the novelist and critic Philippe Sollers, in 1967
began pub- lishing Mao’s poems accompanied by sympathetic articles. By 1971
the journal had switched to an overtly Maoist political and theoretical
position. Although the editorial group flattered Mao as a serious thinker,
lauding in particular his essay “On Contradiction,” the only substantive
point they took from him was about the autonomy of the cultural sphere. Traditional Marxism held that the culture of a society was determined by its
mode of production. Taking their cue from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Tel Quel argued instead that culture was a relatively autonomous realm. This opened a space for them to endorse the notion of cultural politics—the idea
that literature, debates, lectures, performances, and artistic output could
effect social change—a position that was bound to be popular with writers, academics, and artists who had been previously consigned by Marxism to utilitarian roles. Intellectuals were thus elevated to major players in the
socialist revolution. Ideas and attitudes that survive today for which Tel
Quel can claim more responsibility than most include the theory of postmodernism, the academic field of cultural studies, the policy of multiculturalism, the sanctification of theorists as celebrities, and an
utter hostility to liberal-democratic capitalism, especially in its American
form, which the journal identified as the source of all oppression.

Tel Quel’s formal switch to Maoism in 1971 cost it the support of Derrida, Althusser, and a few other writers who did not want to break with the French Communist Party, which remained steadfastly loyal to the USSR. But most of
the editorial group went along with Sollers. The culmination of their
enthusiasm for Mao was a visit to China by Kristeva,Barthes, and Sollers in
1974. In his history of the journal, The Time of Theory (1995), the English
writer Patrick ffrench writes that its Maoism pushed it sharply to the Left.
The group wanted to emulate the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. This
was rather difficult, however, since none were students. They were the
teachers, lecturers, and writers who in China had been dismissed from their
posts and forced into manual work. Instead of going out into the factories
and fields, the Tel Quel writers made do with less arduous measures. They
printed the slogan “Vive la pensée-maotsétoung” in each edition of the
journal and decorated their offices with political graffiti copied from
Chinese walls.

...

From the 1950s to the 1980s, there was a great debate among economists about
the best policies to end the poverty and backwardness in much of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. By this time, enough information had emerged from
the USSR to show that its regime’s claims and statistics about industrial
success and agricultural output in the 1930s and 1940s were either largely
exaggerated or outright bogus. State control of the economy,
collectivization, and five-year plans should have been consigned to the
dustbin of economic history. Yet at the very time this was becoming apparent
to those with eyes to see, left-wing economists were lining up to offer
precisely the same advice to the Third World. Many used Mao’s Cultural
Revolution as confirmation of their case.

In Britain, the group of Keynesian economists at Cambridge University led by
Joan Robinson used its considerable influence with Social Democrat
politicians around the world to argue this line.

...

In the United States, other Keynesian economists took a similar line. In his
1973 book, A China Passage, written after a Potemkin-style tour of the
country, John Kenneth Galbraith gushed: “There can now be no serious doubt
that China is devising a highly effective economic system.” Despite the
complete absence of any credible statistics, Galbraith endorsed estimates by
other economists who traveled with him that Chinese industrial and
agricultural output was growing at 10 or 11 percent per annum: “This does
not seem to me implausible.”

11/04/2005

It may be helpful to consider this passing doff of the hat towards Hitchens in the light of Žižek’s previous comments on the cardinal virtue of Leninism in his 2001 book On Belief: ‘a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it’ (p.4). Žižek’s withering contempt for the anti-war movement is directed against the contrived and (as Lenin would have it) infantile ‘purity’ of its politics, the stance of Hegel’s ‘Beautiful Soul’. Thus, where Hitchens recognises that any authentic political judgment will bloody one’s hands, the anti-war movement is enslaved to the fantasy of its own political innocence. Such a fantasy harbours more than a little unacknowledged violence of its own.

This insistence on Leninist responsibility (again, I can’t help inserting a note of parenthetic petit-bourgeois anxiety here – is Leninism really the most apt name for this responsibly self-implicating politics?) helps make sense of one of the apparent contradictions in Žižek’s political writings, namely that he seems simultaneously more uncompromisingly radical and more pragmatic than the liberal-left he prefers to ignore. He is more radical in that he insists on the imperative and efficacy of political action in the face of the trend towards the primary of the ethical in contemporary Continental European philosophy from Habermas to Derrida and Laclau. In the first of his theoretical appendices, he contrasts the Derridean political act – a strategic intervention which always falls short of an impossibly transcendent ethical imperative – with a more Lacanian conception of the act as ‘the impossible that did happen’ (p.80, Žižek’s emphasis). Whilst the tone of Žižek’s engagement with deconstructive political theory is exact and respectful, it seems also to be the high-theoretical analogue of his much ruder critique of the anti-war left, which also regulates its politics by means of an impossibly high ideal and thereby evades all hard judgments.

Nowhere is the potential folly of such a purist politics better illustrated than in Žižek’s splendid riposte to those ‘Western leftists’ who, in the early 1990s, reproached him for ‘betraying the unique chance of maintaining a united Yugoslavia – to which I always answered that I was not yet ready to lead my life so that it would not shatter the dreams of Western leftists’ (p.24).